Reflections of an integral mind and heart on life, love, sex, God, healing, psychotherapy and everything.

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Saturday, November 10, 2018

Chakras as Body Mapping

There are many ways to slice a pie. The body is holographic: every part of the whole holds the information of the hole, and various maps look at the whole through specific entry points: eyes, hands, feet, hair cells, blood cells, the DNA.

Throughout the times and cultures, sensitive people interested in the body and healing have noticed correlations between parts of the body, and human traits, tendencies and behaviours. As my QiGong teacher Ken Cohen was explaining in one of his trainings, someone must have pressed a point on their hand, and felt a response -say- in the stomach. They noticed a consistency of response, so they mapped that particular point on their hand as being correlated with the stomach, using methods such as applied pressure or inserting a needle to elicit a positive health response in the correlated organ. This is how acupressure and acupuncture were likely to be born.

Every moving object has an electromagnetic field around it, and so does the body, and so do the organs and the glands.The field around each gland appears to visually sensitive people as whirpools spinning like wheels, which explains the Sanskrit word for those fields “Chakra”, wheels. Highly sensitive and perceptive people have noticed a correlation between the energy field of each gland or organ, and certain psychological qualities and themes. The field around the heart or thymus has been associated with love, the field around the pituitary gland, and the area between the eyebrows has been associated with imagination and visionary wisdom, and the field around the pancreas has been associated with personal power, dominance and control.

Language has differentiated between the physical organ and its biological function, and the organ’s Chakra, or energy centre, and the physical and psychological correlated aspects. For example, when speaking of the heart, you refer to the muscle whose function is to pump blood through the body. When speaking of the heart chakra, you may make reference to a person’s receptiveness and generosity to love.

In the past years, Western medical science has shown an increased interest in the correlations between the dysfunction of a body part, and the associated psychological disturbances.

The main fallacy committed in published writings about the chakras is claiming causality where there is none but correlation, drawing criticism upon this paradigm of thought and body mapping as pseudo-science.

In fact, just as thoughts affect biology, and biology affects psychology, it is hard to say whether the health state of an organ affects its field, or the integrity of the organ’s energy field affects the organ’s function. I believe the influence goes both ways, and my experience of twenty years as a Reiki healer working with the body’s fields has shown me that affecting the field can affect the function. The Western Reiki practitioners learn how to sense the chakras by scanning with sensitized palms, and position their hands in a pattern which follows the chakra mapping of the body.

It is common practice during my Reiki training programs for students to experience the resonance between declarative statements and the felt sensations in their corresponding chakras, thus having a personal and direct experience of the correlations.